How to get images out of a PDF
Screenshots of a PDF lose quality. How to extract the original photos from a PDF instead, what to do when an image won’t extract and when to render pages.
Product photos in a supplier’s catalogue, pictures in a brochure, figures in a report: the original image files are sitting inside the PDF. Taking a screenshot captures whatever your screen happened to show at whatever zoom you used. Extracting takes the stored image itself, which is often several times sharper.
Extracting the originals
Extract images looks through the PDF for every embedded image. Photos stored as JPEG come out exactly as they were put in, byte for byte, so there is no quality loss at all. Other images are decoded and saved as lossless PNG and logos with transparent backgrounds keep their transparency. Tiny images such as bullets and icons are skipped unless you ask for them.
When an image won’t extract
Not everything that looks like a picture is one. Charts, diagrams, icons and many logos are drawn as vector shapes: instructions to draw lines and fill areas. There is no image file to extract, but that also means they can be rendered at any resolution. Render the page with PDF to PNG at 300 DPI and crop out the part you want.
When the image is small
A PDF can display a small image stretched across a page and many programs reduce images when exporting PDFs to keep files small. Extraction gives you what is actually stored; nothing can recover detail that was removed when the PDF was made. If you need a larger version, ask for the original image.
Page images instead
If you want what the page looks like, text and pictures together, you need the page rendered rather than its images extracted. That is covered in how to convert a PDF to JPG on a phone and it works the same way on a computer.
Seeing what makes a PDF large
Extracting the images is also a quick way to see why a PDF is so big: if the images add up to most of the file, compression will help a lot. The reasoning is in why won’t my PDF get smaller.
Common questions
Why is the extracted image smaller than it looks in the PDF?
A PDF can stretch a small image across a page and many programs shrink images when creating a PDF. Extraction gives you the pixels that are actually stored, which is the most there is.
Why can I not find the chart or logo I wanted?
Charts, diagrams and many logos are drawn as vector shapes rather than stored as images, so there is no image file to extract. Render the page as a PNG at a high resolution instead.
Are the images the original quality?
JPEG photos come out byte for byte as stored in the PDF, with no recompression. Other images are decoded and saved as lossless PNG.
Can I extract images from a scanned PDF?
A scanned PDF usually holds one image per page, the scan itself, so extraction gives you each page as a picture. That is the same as the scan quality, with nothing lost.